Old Sam and Murray Morgan
This is one of those happy instances of the law of unintended writing consequences.
On page 271 of Though Not Dead, Old Sam tells Pappardelle, “I served in the Aleutians during the war. There wasn’t a lot to do, so every now and then to keep the enlisted out of trouble the brass would get the big idea to have educational talks by anyone they could sucker out of the ranks…One night this Signal Corps guy from Tacoma — what was his name? Morgan, that was it. Anyway, Morgan was some kind of writer or professor or something in real life and he gave us a talk about how the last shot fired in the American Civil War was fired in the Aleutians.”
Murray Morgan was a real person, and lo and behold, I log on to my website one morning to find this message from Murray Morgan’s daughter, Lane:
A friend just told me that my dad, Murray Morgan, is a minor character (or a referenced person) person in Though Not Dead. Very cool. He was indeed in the ASC in the Aleutians at the same time as Dashiell Hammett. I look forward to reading the book and wish Murray were still around to see the reference.
It turns out Morgan wrote long letters home from the Aleutians and Lane has been posting them on line here.
This guy just lived and breathed good writing. I met him through his book, Confederate Raider in the North Pacific, which tells the story of the last shot fired in the Civil War, fired, yes, by Confederate Navy Captain James Waddell who was disrupting the enemy’s economy by sinking Yankee whaling ships in the North Pacific. It is full of delightful prose and terrific little word pictures of the characters involved. One example from page 14:
Richard Wright was not the type of man usually involved in conspiracy. A Liverpool merchant, prosperous and proud of his family, he had a burgher’s respect for safety and six per cent.
Another from page 26:
Charles Francis Adams, the American Minister to Great Britain, was more a precision instrument than a human being. A brilliant, polished New Englander, the son and grandson of presidents, compressed to the hardness of a diamond by the accumulated weight of family tradition, he served as the cutting edge of American diplomacy.
And this about Captain Waddell from page 38:
Waddell was startled by the dissension. A romantic, a believer in the glory of war, he could not understand men who were untempted by adventure.
There are many more similarly wonderful prose portraits, especially of Waddell and his crew, who are parfit, gentil knyghts without sacrificing any attention to their mission, which they fulfill to admiration while murdering no man nor outraging any woman. One of my favorite stories is the whaler which is under the command of the captain’s wife, the captain having died on the voyage. She has preserved his body in a barrel of whiskey so she can take him home and bury him in the family plot. Waddell sinks her ship, but he sees the lady and her pickled husband both landed safely on shore afterward. Marvelous stuff.
Due to what I’m beginning to believe is the almost suicidal shortsightedness of American publishing, Morgan’s book is no longer in print, but fear not because there are used copies galore available on Bookfinder.com. This is the best book written on this subject, and it is well worth the extra effort to acquire. Accept no substitute.
Book Review Monday Chatter Kate Shugak Alaska history Confederate Raider in the North Pacific Kate Shugak Murray Morgan though not dead
I have read and enjoyed all of your Kate Shugak series but was upset by the number of editing errors in “Though Not Dead” eg pg 288 …”she didn’t notice the tail for almost six months.” Surely not months… There just seemed to be a large number of grammatical and spelling errors, more than in the past.
Try blocks. I know, I’ve heard, and I apologize.
I just finished Though Not Dead and loved it! However, there were a great many errors your editor should have caught. In the family tree, you have Chief Lev marry Victoria, when on page one, her name is Alexandra. When Ruthe is talking to Kate, she refers to Chief Lev’s wife and daughter by Ekaterina. I also noticed the “months” error and when Demetri is pulling Kate’s pick-up out of the snow, he uses his parking “break” not “brake.” Also, you have Jim flying at various points into San Jose, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Orange County. Finally, doesn’t Kate get bashed about one too many times here? How many times can she be oblivious to someone sneaking up on her? But, I have to tell you, I loved the story and the history and I’ve already tried to reserve a copy of Castner’s Cutthroats at the library. Finally, I take your book recommendations to heart and Tony Horwitz’ Blue Latitudes was my favorite book that year! Thanks!
Marcy Williams
Thanks, Marcy. I’ve passed your comments about the errors along to my editor.
It’s exciting to hear from you; thank you for such an immediate response. I’d like to weigh in on the sexcapades; more, please! I must confess, sometimes I even read ahead to catch Jim & Kate in the act!
I’ve just reread “Though Not Dead” for the third time. Then I started rereading “Midnight Come Again.” On p. 33, I found this disconnect: Chopin’s parents: “…in their mid-sixties now, both retired, he from his mail route, she from nursing.” I’m having a hard time picturing the connection between this description and that in “Though Not Dead.”
Author brain cramp.
What a great resource Bookfinder.com is. Wow I could stay they for days just looking at all the cool stuff there. If you just type in Queen in 3-D, a cool stereo photo book, by Brian May, all sorts of English things come up. Even articles by the Duke of Marlborough. Also, I am nearly done researching Blood Will Tell and Kate hasn’t been hit on the head even once yet.
During the Civil War a Southern author wrote a series of novels. He tried to mirror current events. The heros were always pure gentlemen killing off the mongrel hoards of the Union.
As the war continued, it became harder to keep the victories flowing. The last novel was about a confederate commerce raider. As it slipped beneath the waves there was a comment that fore shadowed the “Lost Cause”
I never heard of these novels, Grant, thanks for sharing.
Huh. I was in some danger of getting a posting to Adak in my Navy years. A near miss. Went to Guam instead….
You might enjoy The Fleet at Flood Tide, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1971849956 — for certain values of “enjoy”. Gets pretty gruesome at times. I liked his ending quote from Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, to the critics: “Those people never had their balls on that cold, hard anvil.”
In Goodbye, Darkness (https://smile.amazon.com/Goodbye-Darkness-Memoir-Pacific-War-ebook/dp/B001MT5NT6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505749601&sr=1-1&keywords=goodbye+darkness) William Manchester wrote “Thank god for the atom bomb,” and from the perspective of a Marine in the Pacific during World War II you can understand why. (Paul Fussell later used that line for a title of a collection of WWII essays, https://smile.amazon.com/Thank-Atom-Bomb-Paul-Fussell/dp/0786103957/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505749711&sr=1-1&keywords=thank+god+for+the+atomic+bomb.)
Incidentally, I’m not sure I read it first here, but the “gun-type” uranium weapon that destroyed Hiroshima was armed in flight, as the B-29s were less-than-reliable then, and the USAAF was reluctant to lose their airfield and flyers, had the Enola Gay crashed. So some poor engineer from Los Alamos got to place silk bags (I think) of HE into the bomb, while it & he were dangling in the bomb bay of the bomber on its way to Japan. Now, that’s “putting his balls on that cold, hard anvil.”
Gregory Benford also explores this area in his new novel, The Berlin Project, which I commend to your attention: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2043450969
Less than perfect as a novel, but his thesis is gripping: What if the Manhattan Project had yielded a working bomb a year earlier, in 1944, and had helped to shorten the war in Europe? Since Hitler and Co. were killing something like a million people a month in the last year of the European war….
What if, indeed?
ObSF: “A History of the Twentieth Century, with Illustrations”. For a day when your will-to-live is too strong…. Not a story for midwinter Alaska!
“Most of the U-235 for the first uranium bomb was separated by Ernest Lawrence’s “Calutron”, using industrial-scale mass-spectroscopy …” The mind boggles. This ex-chemist’s mind, anyway.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron_Girls (etc)
Some of this stuff was still in service when my Dad spent a sabbatical year in Oak Ridge, circa 1958. Somewhere I have a neutron-activated silver dime, a souvenir of a tour there….
First time I saw Waldos in action!